Interjections

Sometimes I learn things in school that might actually be interesting to people outside the field of Linguistics.

Last week in my Semantics class we studied interjections. (For those of you who don't remember grade school grammar class, interjections are words like "oh," "dang," and "wow" that we interject to express emotion.) My professor explained--in very scientific terms that I no longer remember--that as far as the geography of the brain is concerned, normal speech is processed in one region of the brain and interjections are processed in a completely separate region.

Which means that when children are learning to speak, you can repeat the word "mama" to them a hundred times before they say it back, but they only have to hear you say "uh-oh" or "dang it" once before they start repeating it over and over again. While the normal speech functions are developing in one part of the brain, the injections part of the brain is also developing. And as the interjections part is developing it's just waiting to pick up on interjections. So when kids hear interjections (including swear words), even if they are embedded in a sentence, their interjection receptors are triggered and ta-da! they start using those interjections--whether you want them to or not. (Both my sister and sister-in-law lamented they day their sweet little two-year-olds picked up "dang it"--but I'm sure there are much more offensive words they could be using.)

As an interjection illustration, my prof also shared this excellent story: When he used to visit his mother in a nursing home, he also visited with another woman there who had suffered from a stroke. The stroke destroyed the part of her brain that controlled normal speech functions, but not the part that stored interjections. As a result, her only way to communicate with other people was through swear words. This man would sit and talk to her, ask her questions, tell her stories, whatever, and she would just swear back at him.

One day he explained to her the whole scientific process of how the speech part of her brain was gone but the interjections part was still in tact and that he understood that when she was swearing at him, she was only trying to communicate.

Her response: "Smart-A--"